While the ensuing question may be tiresomely familiar, at least it comes framed today in a novel culinary context. Is José Mourinho, the newly reinstated manager of Chelsea, raving mad?

This ancient inquiry was revived by a lunch last Sunday at La Famiglia, barely a skied penalty from Stamford Bridge. If this is indeed the Portuguese paranoiac’s “favourite Italian restaurant”, as reported, doubts about his sanity scale new heights.

Before any food reached the table, my friend kicked off with a toast. “To absent brethren,” he said as we clinked glasses of rosé. He referred not to Mourinho, who was busy up the road preparing for Chelsea’s seasonal debut against Hull City; but to his fellow Tigers fans Tom Courtenay and Omar Sharif. Long ago on the set of Dr Zhivago, the former somehow infused the Egyptian dreamboat with a passion for his home town’s club, and we had indeed invited Sir Tom to join us for lunch to celebrate Hull’s elevation to the Premier League. Possibly reasoning that we were crazier than Mourinho after researching the restaurant online, his agent declined on his behalf.

Sitting beneath a blue and white striped awning in a garden area patrolled by a phalanx of grizzled, white-jacketed Goodfellas extras, we required a diversion from bread. So we turned our minds to the film, in which Sir Tom played a Bolshevik revolutionary, theorising that if only the communists had clung to power, Roman Abramovich would never have made his billions, left Siberia, bought Chelsea, hired Mourinho, fired him, and rehired him over dinner at this very restaurant. The end of the Cold War has much to answer for.

The enigma of why, in one of world’s most exciting eating cities, they chose La Famiglia for that rendezvous was one the starters were sadly unable to resolve. My friend’s mixed Tuscan antipasti lined up greasy salami alongside bruschetta, wild boar and a viciously saccharine liver paté. While toying wanly with my starter, meanwhile, I wondered whether the menu line “If you have any kind of food allergy, please let the staff know” covered a pathological aversion to tasteless tomato, odiously watery mozzarella and thin olive oil.

Uninspiring: tomato and mozzarella salad (Pic: Martin Pope )

To be fair, the Match of the Day Compendium of Cliché clearly states that a restaurant is about much more than its food, and this celeb-magnet has a certain bustly swagger and charm. Buzzing alluringly with merry chatter, it is an undeniably spirit-lifting venue, and you can’t put a price on that.

You can put a price on pasta dishes, however, and £10.50 for a measly starter portion of pappardelle with a wild boar ragu seemed a liberty. That said, the pasta was barely overcooked and the sauce only mildly oversalted, while spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic and anchovies made a similarly audacious stab at competence. “It’s a relief,” said a friend still traumatised by the antipasti, “that it does what it says on the tin.”

Both main courses also flirted coquettishly with adequacy. Roast rabbit retained some moisture and the red wine sauce, while unsubtle, was far from a catastrophe. My veal piccata with a mushroom sauce and a huge clump of mash was a dish you’d be happy enough to put away in a Tuscan transport caff.

It was at this point that we were engaged in chat by a family of Telegraph readers at the next table, the father sagely observing that this restaurant, which they love, is “very much old Italian”. So it is. According to my patented Which Blair Test?, there are two main categories of Italian restaurant: the Tony (restrained waiters in charcoal grey suits, understated decor and Parmesan shavings, on the lines of the Nineties legend Granita); and the Lionel (histrionic waiters loudly schmoozing favoured clients, powdered Parmesan, dessert trolley). The Eric Blair, aka the George Orwell, in which lunch evokes nothing so much as a boot stamping on a human face for ever, only kicks in around the 2/10 mark.

At an über-Lionel such as this, the warmth and jollity deflect attention from the cooking – though nothing short of the owner signing over the deeds could have compensated for the puddings.

Limoncello cake appeared to have been baked, as a displacement activity, by a frustrated would-be assassin. Caramelised orange slices were staggeringly devoid of taste. “It’s collapsed again,” said my friend as this game of four quarters limped towards full-time. “It picked up a bit after the starters, but this isn’t good at all.”

Why Italian restaurateurs of the Lionellist persuasion think their local popularity absolves them from the duty to produce decent food is beyond me. I used to play poker every week above another such, in Knightsbridge, whose chef was serially incapable of making that notoriously taxing dish, an omelette.

We bade farewell to the family at the next table and to La Famiglia, and went to watch the game in the pub. Somewhere, Tom and Omar were grieving with my friend as the Restoration kicked off with an insouciant 2-0 Chelsea win; but the Special One was grinning. About football, if about nothing else, there is no doubting José Mourinho’s judgment and sanity.